UN Head Visits Sudan with Darfur in Focus

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon headed for Sudan on Monday to lay the groundwork for a solution to the festering Darfur conflict through talks and deployment of thousands of peacekeepers.

Ban, who was flying to Khartoum from a meeting of senior U.N. staff in Turin, Italy, will seek commitment to his plan from Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir and visit a refugee camp in the western Sudanese Darfur region itself.

While Darfur will be the focus, his six-day tour will also include a trip to south Sudan, where a 2005 peace deal ending a 20-year north-south war that killed 2 million people is looking shaky, and take in visits to neighbouring Chad and Libya.

International experts estimate some 200,000 have died and 2.5 million have been driven from their homes during 4-1/2 years of fighting in Darfur. Sudan puts the death toll from the conflict, which flared when rebel groups took up arms against the government, charging it with neglect, at 9,000.

Last week, Ban sketched out a three-point approach to the crisis: deployment of 26,000 U.N. and African Union troops and police, approved by the Security Council in July, peace talks tentatively scheduled for October, and aid.

In an interview with Italian paper La Repubblica on Monday, Ban said Western nations including Italy needed to provide specialist troops for the force.

"We need technical and logistical assets, air transport capacity, and for this we are hoping for the contribution of European countries, including Italy," he said.


NOT ABOUT BREAKTHROUGHS

Aides to Ban sought to play down expectations of the tour. "This is not a trip about breakthroughs," one senior official said."

But the trip comes against a background of a resurgence of violence in Darfur -- denounced as "simply unacceptable" by Ban -- between government and pro-government forces and rebel groups, and what U.N. officials say is worsening malnutrition.

Key to his strategy is the plan for peace talks between Khartoum and most of the dozen or so Darfur rebel groups, for which Ban may announce a venue while in Sudan.

While Bashir has assented to both the talks and the peacekeeping force, Western governments remain suspicious of his sincerity and Britain and France last week revived talk of sanctions if he does not cooperate.

But Western diplomats concede that some on the Security Council, including veto-holding China, oppose sanctions at present. China's ambassador to Sudan said on Sunday that "sanctions cannot help to solve the problem".

In an apparent gesture just before Ban's visit, a Sudanese official said on Sunday Khartoum was discussing the possible return of the country director of U.S-based aid agency CARE, expelled last week for alleged meddling in internal security. The United Nations had criticised the expulsion.

In Chad, Ban will hold talks with President Idriss Deby on the planned deployment of U.N.-backed European Union troops to tackle a crisis created by the flight of more than 200,000 Darfur refugees to Chad.

The U.N. chief's visit to Libya is in acknowledgement of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's role in seeking to bring Darfur's fractious rebel groups together.